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holding bows and sharp arrows waiting for the gym teacher to signal the moment to shoot. And one time a dog wandered onto the field and before the teacher could call it away one of the kids just shot it. And then everyone was running to help the dog and the kid shot another kid and he just kept on shooting until he got tackled. He said he wasn’t a disturbed person. He said he was just a plain normal person that sometimes had to kill people with arrows.

    I didn’t know if the story was true or not. There are a million stories that float around a school. But as my eyes adjusted I saw putrid stacks of gray hay with torn bull’s-eye targets still hanging on them.
    Vicky found a place to sit. Shafts of light fell down around her from holes in the roof. I saw the familiar glue-sniffer brown paper bags laying around. There were the magazines showing nudeness. Pink flobs of skin and black wiry hair. A leak of sunlight slid across Vicky’s back as she leaned down to look at one closer. Tilting her head at the page like she was trying to read a message in bad handwriting. “Look,” she said. A picture of a man having an interaction with a slime flower fold. “Do you know that Jesus loves him just as much as he loves you and me? Isn’t that cracked? Sit down. I want to give you a transformation. I am so good at transformations.”
    In the old days of the father I was in many situations where everything around me was screaming DANGER! DANGER! FREAK OUT AND RUN! but he taught me to go forward. He taught me to remember I was Navy all the way and to go forward without fear. Compared to what I have seen in my life, Vicky Talluso’s world was nothing. But I was out of practice. It had been a long time. I was rusty and all I needed was a little oil. That is what the father would have said before he passed me the flat bottle of Old Skull Popper. “Clyde, you have nothing to fear ’til you run out of beer.”
    Mostly he was right. Mostly what looked like a horrifying scene at first turned out to be nothing at all. Like the transformation Vicky wanted to give me. All she meant by it was she wanted to put makeup on me. She said there was no reason for me to go around looking like a skag when I didn’t have to.
    She pulled out a pink rattail comb and moved me into a pool of light. “No offense but your hair is horrible. You need to grow it, OK? You will look a lot better with long hair. I am going to do beauty for a living. I just have it in me. I can just look at a person and tell exactly what to do.” The feeling of her combing my hair made a nice sensation in the back of my throat.
    She said, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
    “No.”
    “Did you ever have one?”
    “Nuh-uh. No.”
    “Well, when I finish this, I know the perfect guy for you. Do you get high? You ever drop before?”
    “No.”
    “Because you’re against it?”
    “I’m not against it.”
    “Then because no one ever got you high before, right?”
    “Right,” I said.
    “God. You are going to be soooooo thankful that you met me. You are going to love me so much after today. You haven’t ever done anything exciting, have you?”
    “Partly I have.”
    “What?”
    “Well, I killed somebody once. A couple people, actually.”
    She was snort-laughing. I felt her breath on the back of my neck. It had a scent that surprised me. Under the cig smell there was a cherry cough drop smell I hadn’t noticed before. Part medicine, part pretty candy.
    She said, “You killed people?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yessssss. God, you are sick. How. How did you kill them?”
    “With Little Debbie.”
    She was laughing again. Pushing my head forward and ratting my hair high. She said, “Roberta, this guy I was telling you about? He is going to
love
you.”



Chapter 7
    HE FATHER drove through the darkness. He drove and he drove. I curled up in the well of the backseat floor and felt the vibrations of the road beneath us. The father sang with the radio. He had a decent voice. He